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06 December 2007

See what happens when you listen and respond?

The moms won a major victory today when YouTube reinstated the League of Maternal Justice's breastfeeding montage video. You'll recall that the video was created as a protest of Facebook's decision to ban a user because she posted pictures of herself breastfeeding her kids.

In response to YouTube's decision, LMJ put together a social media release and got some attention from the media in India. While the attention may have helped, in the end all it really took was for someone at YouTube to read an email from the moms, apply context to content, make a smart decision, and write back. That's what adults do.

So kudos to YouTube for doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, it took an overwhelming amount of pressure (i.e., the loss of advertising dollars) from all sources to convince Facebook to respect the basic privacy rights of its members. And they have yet to respond to the moms' basic question about Facebook's apparent inability to apply context to content. And there are still some very important questions that remain to be answered about Beacon, such as what Facebook is doing with the user information it still collects as part of the application.

Facebook has hopefully learned an important lesson - just because you're a "walled garden," you can't put a wall between your management and your users. But the communication regarding Beacon can't be the "last resort" or exception to the rule as it is now - it has to be a first step in a new commitment to communication, transparency, and maturity in decision-making.